Tag: License Plates in Dynamics AX Warehouse Management

The release of Dynamics AX 2012 R3 contained the new Warehouse Management module. One of the concepts introduced as part of this module, is the inventory dimension of license plate. This article will outline a few specifics about this new inventory dimension.

When you enable warehouse management, it enables several new inventory dimensions. Those are Location, Inventory Status and License Plate. These dimensions are not optional when using warehouse management.

The license plate inventory dimension is designed to allow you to track and move material in the warehouse by license plate numbers, typically applied to pallets. In this way, you can move a pallet that may contain many boxes of the same or different items in one transaction. The license plate dimension can also be used to generate labels.

The warehouse management module requires that the following locations be license plate controlled:

Shipping Dock

Receiving Dock

Mobile Device User

To define a location as license plate controlled, you assign a location profile that has the “Use license plate tracking” box checked.

You can setup only these three locations to be license plate controlled, and then leave the rest of your locations, not license plate controlled. This may be useful for implementations where you want to use mobile devices, but your warehouse isn’t complex enough or doesn’t have the volume to necessitate using license plates throughout the entire warehouse process.

If you only setup the required locations to be license plate controlled, then you can setup the mobile device menu options to generate a license plate automatically. See the purchase order receiving menu item below as an example.

In this example, this would cause a license plate to be automatically assigned to the incoming material, at the receiving dock. Once the material is put away, into a non-license plate controlled location, the users won’t have to transact with the license plate number until it’s time to ship the item. When it’s time to ship, you can setup the mobile device menu item to generate a license plate automatically for shipping transaction as well. So in this scenario, even though the license plate was generated at item receiving and item shipping, the user never needs to enter the license plate since its generated automatically by the system. AX is generating and using the license plate, but the end users may never notice it.

In summary, the new warehouse management module in AX 2012 R3 is powerful and robust. The additional required inventory dimensions may seem like they add a lot of overhead, but if you’ve got an implementation that is more simplistic, you can make decisions during the setup to reduce the work for the end user.